I pull up the first pot on a twenty pot run. Tails wriggling, bellies extending, teeth grinding — perhaps three dozen small brown, yellow and black blowfish magically become air and water filled baseballs inside the one-by-two inch galvanized turkey wire trap I built during the winter months..
I pull back the bungee-corded hook, open the pot and shake them into a fish tote on the floor of my skiff, rebait the pot, and flip it back right-side up, tossing the buoyed line over and passed the stern cleat. As I steam slowly to the next pot in line, I’m bent over literally popping the little white balloons so the rest will fit — after they are popped as well. When I’m done the black plastic fish tote — made to hold one hundred pounds of fish with forty pounds of flake ice — is three quarters full of the deflated “blow toads”. That’s the easy part. They have to be skinned right away or the bodies stiffen and the skin tightens making it much more difficult to do. Many will be skinned alive. It will take well over an hour.
At the boat show along the bay marina when I participate in the Long Island Traditions Maritime Program there — with several other career baymen, fishermen, boatbulders, etc. — some families with children will be scandalized at my making a show of how these little sea creature blow up tighter than a tennis ball as I squeeze them above the aerated seawater-filled cooler in front of my display table. The children didn’t flinch from their morning banter and their smart phone texting as the parents served them mass produced bacon and eggs and a glass of milk that morning — even though we’ve all seen how the farm animals are poisoned and coerced into becoming tortured mega-producers.
But the “’Finding Nemo’ Effect” has taken hold. The poor cute and innocent fish needs to be left to its peaceful nonviolent existence. How cruel I am to usurp that little being for my money-making show (we get paid well for the day). I sometimes — but rarely — will summarize the above gory details for the offended audience and ask them if they eat hamburgers. “How can you kill all those poor cows?”
When I see a knife cut through the backbone of a little blowfish still grinding its teeth I have not one qualm about not making it happy by throwing it back. During the fall migration they are eating everything in sight. They cannot be kept in an aquarium with other species; they attack them enmasse no matter how big like bucktoothed piranha and will leave nothing but bones. They themselves are eaten in the millions by fish with teeth sharp enough to pop them and/or bellies big enough not to have to spit them up when they distend their coarse sandpaper-like belly skin.
We fishermen are just a small strand in the web of life.
When I see the beautiful, pristine, spine free “chicken of the sea” tails I see Bay-gold. And I see smiling families enjoying this local seasonal feast. I didn’t change anything of the life of the Bay. It is beautiful and bloody all season long without me. But I did pay my bills and raise a family by being a part of it — while at the same time being the very living connection between the life in and on the water and lives of the human families on dry ground.
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